The Collecting Logic of NFT Art: Reconstructing Aesthetic Value in the Age of Digital Ownership
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.64504/artsappreciation.v1i1.883Abstract
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), as a blockchain-based mechanism for certifying digital ownership, have since the market explosion of 2021 profoundly restructured the construction of scarcity, value authentication, and collecting practice in digital art, posing systematic challenges to traditional aesthetic value judgment. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's theory of the "aura," Pierre Bourdieu's cultural capital theory, Nadini et al.'s (2021) quantitative analysis of 4.7 million NFT market transactions, and Belk et al.'s (2022) consumer research on metaverse property, this paper examines the value reconstruction mechanisms of NFT art collecting across three dimensions: (1) the artificial construction of technical scarcity — how blockchain re-aurates the digital copy through cryptographic means; (2) the de-institutionalization of value authentication — how algorithms, communities, and on-chain records challenge the traditional authority of curators, auction houses, and critics; and (3) the financialization paradox of collecting practice — the structural tension between aesthetic value and speculative capital. The study finds that NFT collecting logic does not simply replicate traditional art market value judgment, but generates a new value system replacing "material authenticity" with "technical authenticity," "institutional authorization" with "community consensus," and "physical scarcity" with "algorithmic scarcity." This research carries direct reference value for constructing contemporary digital art criticism discourse and refining art market regulatory frameworks.
References
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